Hi. It is important to remember that religion in ancient and medieval societies wasn’t very clearly delineated from other elements of one’s identity as it is today. So references to religious groupings are rarely ever encountered. It is more likely that ‘out groups’ would be identified by ethnicity, language, region or occupation. On much the same lines, references to one’s own group used these identities. So for example, the people coming to India from the North Western frontier were called ‘Yavana’, a sanskritised version of Ionian, a reference to the Greeks. This continued to be in use even for such new comers as the Turks, who were definitely not Greek, had no religious, linguistic or ethnic connections with the Greeks and were known to be different by the Indians at the time. Similar is the case of the word Hindu. Hindu is a word that appears in even ancient texts. Only, these are Persian texts, not Sanskrit or Pali. In Persian, the word was used to simply refer to the rather nebulous mass of people living beyond the river Indus. In this sense, the word continued to be used by the Turkish rulers of India to differentiate themselves from the people they ruled. So medieval texts will often use the word to signify someone of Indian descent, irrespective of their religious affiliation. It is interesting to note that the rulers of Vijayanagara also used it in the similar sense when they called themselves ’Hindu raya suratrana’, thus proclaiming their right of suzerainty over all peoples east of the Indus to a largely Persianate audience. The British and other colonial powers inherited this frame of reference from the Mughals, who maintained their claim to central Asian descent. Early British writing on India therefore, refers to the ruling elite as ‘Turks’, ‘Mongol’, ‘Mohammedans’ and the subjects as Hindu. Over time, this became reduced to Hindus as referring to the religious grouping as we know it today. What did the ancient and medieval Hindus call themselves? Anything from devotees of this god or that goddess to upholders of dharma to those belonging to certain regions, professions, castes, schools of thought and so on. The words Vaishnava and Shaiva literally mean ‘of Vishnu’ and ‘of Shiva’. They make their appearance at around the 10th Century CE but in a slightly different form. These two words are used more as descriptive adjuncts than as identity labels. So a king subscribing to what we would today call Vaishnavism would use the word in context of something like ‘devotee of Vishnu’ and not as ‘belonging to the Vaishnava sect’ as we would understand it today. It’s a very subtle difference, but a very significant one. The words Vaishnavism and Shaivism are largely of colonial and post colonial mintage, as convenient labels in sociology.